Reader and writers were interfaces before 0.15.1. What’s new is that they are buffered. I don’t think that zig discourages interfaces, just that the language doesn’t hide anything. An interface in all system languages is a struct with a vtable just like in zig but that they have an easy way of creating one. If you need one in zig you can go that approach or use a tagged union just that zig is open about what an interface is.
bbatha|5 months ago
Perl objects worked like this and the ecosystem is a mess as a result. There's a built in `bless` to add a vtable. There's some cool stuff you can do with that like blessing arrays to do array of structs vs struct of arrays and making it look like a regular object in user code. The problem is there are like 4 popular object libraries that provide base stuff like inheritance, meta objects, getters/setters etc and they're not all compatible and they have subtle tradeoffs that get magnified when you have to pull multiple in to get serious work done.
scuff3d|5 months ago
Let me ask this: hypothetically if they wanted to, would it be possible for Zig to add a language feature called Interface which provided to the user "...an easy way of creating one".
0-R-1-0-N|5 months ago